Columbus, Ohio is named Smart Cities Dive’s city of 2018

Columbus, Ohio has been named City of the Year in the Smart Cities Dive website’s awards for its work on transit and electrification.

The US city won the US Department of Transportation’s inaugural Smart City Challenge two years ago – and is rolling out a variety of smart city-related programmes.

Smart Cities Dive said the city’s “biggest area of progress this year” has been its increased reliance on electric vehicles (EVs), including in its bus fleet and other government vehicles.

City authorities have announced that they are more than halfway to a goal of 300 EVs in public fleets by 2020, and says that adoption of EVs throughout the city is up 65% from 2017.

The award also reflects Columbus’ embrace of dockless bikes and scooters, and the addition of bus rapid transit (BRT) through the downtown area on one of the busiest routes operated by the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA).

COTA also collaborated with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission on the C-pass intiatives, giving free bus travel to 45,000 employees who work downtown.

Meanwhile, the Smart Cities Dive Deal of the Year award went to Lyft’s acquisition of Motivate, which “helped level the playing field” between Lyft and Uber after the latter bought dockless bike-share company Jump.

Disruptor of the Year was given to dockless bike provider Lime, which launched in 2017 and now has a presence in more than 100 markets worldwide – and this year branched out by unveiling a car-share programme in Seattle.